Associate Director, Engineering & Sustainability Program Lead (San Francisco)

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San Francisco, CA, United States

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Associate Director, Engineering & Sustainability Program Lead

Compensation Range: $150,000-$200,000 based on experience.

Location: This roles location is in San Francisco/ Bay Area (hybrid), 3-4 times a month.

Stok has a hybrid workforce across North America and globally. Although we have offices in San Francisco, San Diego, Denver and some coworking locations across the continent, we encourage team members to pursue a workfromhome, hybrid or inperson setup that works best for them. This position requires three days on site at a client location in the Bay Area.

Job Description

General Intro:

Stok leads organizations to decarbonize now. We integrate expertise across ESG and sustainability consulting, carbon, energy engineering, commissioning, and project delivery. From the enterprise to asset level, we provide clients with strategy, management, and technical support to translate bold commitments into impact. Our global team delivers on client ambitions across programs and projects worldwide. In our own operations, Stok uses thirdparty frameworks such as B Corp, the International Living Future Institute (ILFI) Just Label, and the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to guide, verify, and share our progress toward our commitment to a radically better world for all.

Stok supports many largescale clients, providing embedded team members to work as an extension of our clients to support the establishment, longterm strategic planning, and daytoday implementation of their real estate engineering and/or sustainability programs. Each program is unique; with different team dynamics, levels of resourcing, focus areas, levels of development, breadth, and different sets of challenges. Weve been supporting these clients as trusted advisors and embedded owner representatives for many years and are excited to continue to grow these relationships. This role would be for one of Stoks key clients, functioning as their Global Engineering and Sustainability Program lead with the expectation that the candidate would be dedicated for 7590% of their time to this client. The ideal candidate should be passionate about moving the built environment into the future and have a knack for empowering engineering and sustainability initiatives within corporate environments.

At Stok, We Seek Culture Add, Not Culture Fit.

At Stok, our values guide every decision we make and action we take on behalf of our partners and clients. They are:

  • Own it
  • Demand better

Our ValuesAligned Team Members:

  • Craft innovative ideas and have a say in how the firm operates. We have built selfmanagement and distributive governance into our organizational structure to enable every team member to share input on policies and procedures.
  • Strive for a better way to do business and create a positive impact through their work. Stok believes in business as a force for good and is a certified B Corp, demonstrating our commitment to maximizing social and environmental impacts, in addition to profit.
  • Give back in a meaningful way. We donate 3% of profits to causes we believe in through a combination of probono services and donations.
  • Advocate for a level playing field. Stok has intentionally baked social justice into our operations, which we hold ourselves accountable to through our International Living Future Institute JUST Label.
  • Participate in a transparent, objective, meritbased compensation and profit distribution processes and policies.

Our purpose is to boldly catalyze an environmentally restorative and socially equitable world, and Stok needs you to fulfill it!

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Embedded Role
    • As embedded team member within our clients real estate organization you will act on their behalf to implement, manage and progress their program and provide regular updates to the client point of contact.
  • Annual strategic planning support
    • It is common for this role to support our clients in their development of annual and 3year planning for their respective programs. This is big picture thinking at its best! Youll need to be able to take all of your technical expertise and clientspecific knowledge to inform the development of broader programmatic goals. Examples include developing roadmaps for AI adoption, decarbonization, site/portfolio resilience, an electric vehicle charging program, and/or guideline development.
  • As our clients programlevel support, youll often be asked to help inform their individual project teams of what program requirements need to be met at the project level. As you gain familiarity with a multitude of ongoing capital improvement projects, youll inevitably begin to find areas for programmatic process improvement. Youll also likely support our client in developing new / updated global design & construction guidelines. Prior experience doing so is greatly valued!
  • Executive communications
    • You will be in charge of developing and potentially delivering executive communications related to the program to executive leadership within the clients real estate organization. The ability to clearly convey complex information, often to leadership who is not technical, will be critical.
  • Thought partnership and the business case
    • Our client is looking for a thought partner who can identify areas for innovation and improvement and to help them make the business case to their leadership to implement that innovation and improvement. Understanding market trends in the space and what the clients competitors are doing will be very helpful in encouraging action.
  • When technical building systems unexpectedly fail and quick solutions exceed the capabilities of the onsite facilities team, youll be the technical backstop. It is important to clarify, in this role you wont necessarily be responsible for implementing the solution when technical problems arise (ex. migrating oil in a multichiller CHW system), but you will be responsible for owning the problem. Practically speaking, this means guiding troubleshooting efforts with facilities engineers, vendors, specialists, vendors, etc., by convening the right parties, asking the right questions, and developing a plan of action that all parties can follow.

QUALIFICATIONS

  • This role acts as a conduit to the Global Engineering and Sustainability leaders of our clients, so the role needs to have prior experience and comfortability with taking on a large amount of accountability. Core to this is the ability to act in an ownership capacity with a high degree of authority through a reliance on transparency and credibility.
  • As an embedded role on our clients team, youll be the pointperson for all of Stoks scopes, not only your own. This means having the ability to spot opportunities to continue to sell impactful work, even if that work is executed by a Stoker other than yourself. Youll have to learn to speak intelligently about services outside of your domain of expertise, strategize with our client solutions team on how to grow our impact, and coordinate many internal Stokers to help ensure overall deliverable quality and client expectations are met.
  • It is expected that this role be equipped with a deep understanding of building engineering systems (mechanical, electrical, plumbing, BMS, EVCS, renewables, etc.). Traditionally, weve staffed this role with team members with commissioning / energy auditing / retrocommissioning experience, but were open to alternative backgrounds as long as you have experience troubleshooting technical challenges.
  • Experience designing and implementing real estate programs focused on driving sustainability and reducing energy consumption. That could be as a consultant or experience inhouse.

What youll need to be successful in this role:

  • Flexibility & ability to easily integrate with client teams
    • As a parttime embed, we expect this role to be dedicating a large percentage of their working day to supporting a single client point of contact and their inhouse team. This means they need to develop an intimate understanding of how the client operates quickly and seamlessly integrate with their preferred processes and systems. The focus of these engagements is often dynamic, so it is important for this role to have flexibility.
  • Exceptional communication skills are essential for this role, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for diverse audiences, including senior leadership.
  • This role requires strong project management capabilities to oversee complex, multistakeholder initiatives from concept through completion. Youll need to balance strategic planning with handson execution, ensuring alignment across teams, maintaining clear timelines, and driving accountability to deliver impactful results.
  • Navigating high levels of ambiguity
    • As trusted advisors, our clients often let us in behindthescenes on how decisions are made and how operations are run within their organizations. This often means that things are not always straightforward; tasks arent well defined, problems can be plentiful but notyet prioritized, and resources may be organized and ready for action. This role will need an aptitude in navigating these sometimesilldefined environments and will need to rely on a high level of initiative to offer suggestions for programmatic improvement and support in implementing the solutions.

Additional experience wed be excited for you to bring (not required, but a bonus to our team and our clients):

  • Experience acting in a embed role with a client, preferably a corporate occupier with a global office portfolio
  • Familiarity with comm]]>